Join Daniel Mendelsohn for a six-session webinar on his new translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
Few works are as central to the Western tradition as is Homer’s Odyssey, which uses its trickster hero’s decade-long struggle to return home after the Trojan War as a vehicle for exploring the most profound elements of human existence: the nature of identity and the meaning of the self, the allure of adventure and the comforts of home. But while its ostensible subject is a man, Homer’s epic is also notable for its profusion of fascinating and powerful female characters, each of whom establishes a literary model that will persist throughout European literature: the loyal wife, Penelope, and the seductress Helen of Troy; the love-sick goddess Kalypso and the darkly alluring sorceress Circe; the vengeful adulteress Clytemnestra, the powerful queen Arétê, and the charming ingenue princess, Nausicaa; and, hovering above them all, the goddess Athena, whose intelligence only Odysseus can equal. The hero’s homecoming journey, therefore, constitutes an exploration of femininity in all its moods and colors—and provides the archetypes for female characters that persist to the present day.
Six one-hour sessions: September 10, 17, 24; October 8*, 15, 22. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.
*There will be no session on October 1 during the observance of Yom Kippur.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Matt Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, essayist, and translator. His eleven books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a translation, with commentary, of the Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy; and three collections of essays, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2018). Over the past thirty years. Mr. Mendelsohn has contributed over three hundred essays, reviews, articles, and translations to numerous publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, and has been a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, and BBC Culture. His writing for mainstream publications covers a wide range of subjects, from Classical civilization to contemporary literature, as well as film, theater, opera, and television. Mr. Mendelsohn’s honors include the National Jewish Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Style, the Society for Classical Studies Presidents’ Medal, Princeton University’s James Madison Medal, the Prix Médicis in France and the Malaparte Prize in Italy, that country’s highest literary honor for foreign authors. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.
Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint professor of Humanities at Bard College, lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2025.
About this series
The figure of the tragic heroine—suffering, abject, grandiose, vengeful, self-sacrificing, murderous, noble, seductive—has gripped the Western imagination for nearly thirty centuries, from the Homeric epics to twentieth-century cinema and theater. Our cultural obsession with these characters raises a compelling question: Why have male authors focused so consistently on the representation of suffering females—often for the benefit of male audiences? In this four-part NYRSeminar, New York Review of Books Editor-at-Large Daniel Mendelsohn will take participants through a series of close readings of major works that established and then developed our female literary archetypes— from Homer’s Odyssey to representative works of Greek tragedy, and from the nineteenth-century novel and opera to four major works of twentieth-century theater—as we explore the aesthetic nature and ideological roots of this cultural preoccupation.
